Clicking your way to clinical confusion
- TAGS:Alzheimer's, BMI, exercise, FreeMD, Justanswer, Realage
- IT TOPICS:Applications, Devices, E-Business, Internet
In addition to various online symptom checkers I wrote about today, the Web abounds with all kinds of other online testing sites. Curious about your "real" age, IQ, hearing ability, if you're likely too drunk to drive or how many calories you're burning during those workouts? You can and find all that and a lot more online. Here are some sites that I found interesting.
This is another kind of symptom checker site with a twist - it uses video to present a real-life doctor who actually asks you prerecorded questions. It's similar to other sites in that you pick from dozens of topics and answer questions to navigate through a decision tree, but it seemed gimmicky to me and not as complete as the other sites.
If you don't mind paying money for your online health info, this site claims to have varying numbers of doctors and nurses ("subject to a rigorous screening process") online NOW to answer your questions for a fee.
On recent days 30 and 33 medical professionals were online waiting for questions. Some example questions were answered for fees of $9 and $15.
It also offers other categories, with 245 experts online recently to answer questions about computers, pets, legal issues, cars and much more. My favorite category was "large animals."
Mental Health screening center
Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance
Here you can take confidential online tests for depression, mania and anxiety
National Heart Lung and Blood Institute
This is probably the most useless health-related measurement ever devised. You're not likely to fall into the normal healthy category unless you have the physique of a marathon runner or supermodel. Many superbly conditioned athletes with pumped up bodies and 3% body fat could be classified as obese. To test my theory I plugged in the measurements for Troy Polamalu, the ball-hawking, hyperactive safety for the Super Bowl champion Pittsburgh Steelers. Sure enough, probably the most feared defensive back in the NFL is obese.
American Cancer Society
Here you can get an indication of the calories burned in a workout or ordinary daily activity. Numbers are estimated for a 150 lb. person and will vary depending on weight, body composition, and level of intensity. It's fun to see how racquetball compares with skiing, dancing or playing with the kids in burning calories. The site also has a target heart rate calculator and another tool to tell you how many calories you need to maintain your current weight.
This site claims "We all have unique personalities, abilities, styles, and approaches to learning, solving problems, or handling tasks. For this reason, researcher Howard Gardner, Ph.D., a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, believes people have different types of intelligences. As part of his multiple intelligences theory, Gardner has identified various types of intelligences. The quiz duly indicates what type of intelligences you may have, with choices such as bodily-kinesthetic, logical-mathematical, musical, linguistic and spatial.
Heartland Health
You provide gender, weight, type of beverage, how many of them and in what time span. It estimates your blood alcohol concentration and provides information about the effects on the body of different concentrations.
PDRhealth.com
Enter any number of medications and it gives you possible side effects of different combinations.
Over40andfighting.com
This is a memory test in which you click on tiles that flip over briefly to reveal different shapes and you try to match all the shapes in fewest number of attempts, because failing memory is one of the symptoms of Alzheimer's disease. I scored average. It's part of a larger site devoted to helping persons over the age of 40 fight different diseases and conditions.
Live life to the youngest. This site requires an e-mail address and password and asks a bunch of questions about habits, education level, work status, ethnic background, amount of sleep you get, height, weight, blood pressure, medications, how you drive, relationships, fitness and more. It eventually displays your "real" age and gives you a plan to live "younger." With all those factors taken into account, I'm supposedly 10 years older than my actual calendar age. Feels like 20.
Online hearing tests
There are a bunch of these on the Web, all of questionable value in view of environmental factors, quality of your sound card and speakers/headphones, etc. But they're unique in that you can actually interact with the tests by responding to audio signals with feedback.
Here are some I found most interesting.
Equal loudness contours and audiometry - Test your own hearing
The University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
This is an involved and time-consuming test in which a big multiple bar chart of different frequency scales is used to determine a reference point and let you provide feedback to measure your frequency response range by indicating the same "loudness" of the reference point at different frequencies. You can compare your curve to "standard equal loudness" curves.
Here are several different tests with different numbers of tones used for calibration and measurement. It's also very involved and produces interesting left ear and right ear graphs indicating your range of hearing. You can print these graphs for reference against future tests. It didn't work properly on a Mac, even though OS X was listed as one of the supported operating systems.
"A free collection of online audio tests, test tones, audio signals and more!" Besides measuring certain aspects of your hearing ability with a couple of different tests, it also lets you check your audio equipments' performance. I found out my speakers are plugged in correctly. I didn't check their low frequency response, high frequency limit or other performance metrics.
This site lets you "Test your musical skills in 6 minutes." Some of the tests arose out of a research project and in addition to tone deafness, adaptive pitch and rhythm tests, it lets you gauge your visual learning ability, specifically if you can "hear shapes."
National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders
This site claims that tone deafness is an inherited characteristic, caused by nature, not nurture. To test your sense of pitch, 26 familiar tunes are played and you press a radio button to indicate if they were played correctly or not. I got 18 out of 26 right which means I have "a fine sense of pitch." But I felt I had no idea on many of them and was just guessing.
MedlinePlus From the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of health
If you want explore more health sites on your own, this government resource provides dozens of topics arranged alphabetically, pointing to several other sites where you can take tests and get information.
IQ tests
These are probably the most prevalent tests on the Web. I found them to vary wildly in format and end results. Sometimes I was below average, sometimes I was above average. Some of them take you through a long, time-consuming test and at the end tell you a full report on your intelligence is available for purchase. I finally gave up on evaluating these; there are just too many and they take too long and aren't consistent at all. Just Google "IQ test" if you want to venture into the maze.
HumanMetrics
This has nothing to do with health, really. It deals with personality types, but I found it so interesting I had to include it. It's "based on Carl Jung and Isabel Myers-Briggs typological approach to personality." I went through a full-blown all-day Myers-Briggs evaluation years ago and this is the same kind of test. A 72 item questionnaire results in your personality type. It links to Keirsey.com for further exploration of the various types. The personality type that was assigned to me is absolutely uncanny in its accuracy. It describes me right down to amazingly specific detail. It's definitely worth checking out.
But the scary thing about the Myers-Briggs test is that it indicated approximately 5% of the population is just like me. Yikes!
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